The Joy of Sanding

On the list of books nobody ever wrote, The Joy of Sanding has to be pretty near the top.  It's simple drudgery.  But if you don't like sanding, you probably shouldn't build a boat, and if you build a boat despite your dislike for sanding, you can't really expect anyone to feel sorry for you. 

Power tools make any task go by more quickly, but the odd angles and precision required by sanding the interior fillets on the Melanesia hull just don't work well with any power sander I can think of.  So if you're doing all the work, you'll want to make sure you have the right tools for the job.

When I stepped onto the porch this morning, I found this unintentional still life on the center thwart.  These are the tools I've been using to smooth my fillets, laid out of the way while I vacuumed the dust out of the hull.  I've been using these tools:

• coarse (60 grit) sandpaper wrapped around a rough cedar dowel that might end up as a T-handle for one of my paddles, for sanding the curved fillets;
• a SurForm (surface-forming) plane;
• a 4-in-hand rasp that I think I found in the street years ago.
• and a folded scrap of 60 grit sandpaper for the fine work

Of these, the 4-in-hand rasp has been the most useful.  It's great for knocking down high spots, and I've found that it chews up the fluffy fillet epoxy nicely, but doesn't really dig into the pure epoxy coating on the wood, so it's great for smoothing down the raised edges of the fillets where I peeled back the masking tape.

The point of all this is - of filleting in general, and of sanding the fillets smooth in particular - is to provide a very smooth, gently curved transition from one panel to the other.  Well-supported fiberglass tape has excellent tension strength, but if you put a hard corner in it, or leave a gap beneath the tape, you're creating concentration of stresses that will eventually become a point of failure.

The good news is that it's not finish sanding.  The epoxy will fill any scratching left behind by the coarse sandpaper or the even coarser rasp. 

Anyway, in my own build, I'm almost done sanding and hope to put the first glass tape on today.  That's a real milestone, and I'm excited to move beyond the fillets to the next stage of things.